@Greatdismal, of course, is William Gibson. Who nicely just retweeted this. In case any Bitcoin advocate cares, incidents like this are exactly why Bitcoin will never go mainstream, but I doubt they're listening to me. But I'm just a guy writing about the metaverse industry occasionally noticing current events are indistinguishable from science fiction written just twenty-thirty years ago, so why should they listen?

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Can't follow your logic why incidents like this mean Bitcoin can't go mainstream. Tragic as activities like this always are, if a ransom was demanded in cash, gold bars, or diamonds, would you have the same arguments against those? All it says to me is that these criminals see Bitcoin as a valuable commodity, as do many others.

Props to you for continuing to report on the met averse. I suggested in another of your BTC posts that you could trial BTC donations by putting a QR code in the footer of your blog to evaluate it's utility for that purpose but didn't get a reply to that ( http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2016/01/bitcoin-hype-linden-dollars.html ). You have a pretty tech-savvy readership so I would not be surprised if it worked out as a good move for you, or at least a worthy experiment which you could report on.